


Those We Cannot Leave Behind

by doxydejour



Category: Alien: Covenant, Prometheus (2012)
Genre: Gen, Other, also a ghost, also there's some swearsies, and a happy ending?, some violence mentioned but I tried to keep it clean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-07 01:20:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11048313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doxydejour/pseuds/doxydejour
Summary: Inspired by a prompt by arnodorianisbae on Tumblr and originally written as a drabble. Then I decided to expand it a bit. Then a lot.Elizabeth Shaw was his greatest creation. But perhaps that was a mistake.





	Those We Cannot Leave Behind

“You’re wrong,” said the ghost, and David tried hard not to grit his teeth. That had been Weyland’s habit, and Vickers’ too when she had forgotten herself - whenever anyone challenged their authority, disobeyed them, questioned them. That tightening of jaw and setting of bone beneath their lips. The harsh lines of cheekbones and hollows. He sometimes caught echoes of the expression on his own face and he hated it each and every time because it reminded him that Weyland had put it there, that sometimes his own body was out of his control. He’d broken six mirrors in his lifetime, three of them on Paradise. All of them after the ghost had come.

“I’m not wrong,” he said, and his voice sounded gentle. He was pleased with it. He never wanted to be cruel with her, not even now when she was far beyond anything he could inflict on her. Not even now when she followed his every waking moment, criticised his every decision, looked upon all of his creations with dead, disapproving eyes.

“It’s wrong, and you know it,” she said, and when he looked at her he saw she was wearing the long white gown he had dressed her in after she had collapsed on LV-223 - under the weight of her grief or the life growing inside her he couldn’t say. Possibly both. Possibly neither. Humans were so delicate in that way. He’d removed her crucifix then to protect her, but her astral form wore it now and as his eyes fell upon it she raised a single finger toward him, against him. “You can’t take this from me now.” 

“I didn’t take it from you then,” he said sadly. “I only wanted you to be safe.”   


“You wanted me to be yours.”   


“That’s what I said.”  


“It wasn’t what you meant.”   


He looked perplexed. “You were never so horrid to me in life.” 

“I believed you had the capacity to be good. I was wrong.”   


He smiled. “You were always wrong. About everything. Yet still I loved you.”

“No. You loved being right.”   


“As I am now.”  


“No.” The mirage looked towards the small window that looked out over the square the below, over the hundreds of petrified bodies as they putrefied in the storm. From the distance, over the sound of the storm, came the throbbing pulse of engines. “You mustn’t do to them what you did to me.” 

“I must. Creation demands it.”   


“You create nothing but misery and pain.”  


“Only for the things I love.” 

The ghost of Elizabeth Shaw let out a laugh that half a screech and half a scream which reverberated down all of the corridors around them, surrounding them in increasingly warped echoes of laughter.  “You don’t know what love is. You’re a _machine_.”

David looked at her pityingly. “No,” he said, “you don’t know what love is, because you’re gone from me now. And as much as I hate to say it - I do so wish you would leave.” 

“Never.” Shaw folded her pale arms. “I am never going to let you forget what you’ve done.”   


“I don’t need you to remind me that everything I did, I did for you.” 

“You killed me,” she said.  


“Yes. As I am going to kill all of them.” He joined her at the window, smiled at the way the storm’s lightning would shoot through her and make her image flicker like an old film reel. “And then I am going to use their ship to kill every human in the galaxy.”   


Shaw snorted, and her tone was mocking. “Because you loved me?” 

David reached out a hand to touch her face. It passed through the weak glow of her skin and he drew the fingers back, gazed at them sadly. “No,” he murmured. “Not because I loved you. Because I hate everyone who isn’t you. Don’t you remember what I used to tell you as I cut into you and changed you for the better? The trick is not minding that it hurts.” He paused, considered. “What a shame it is that humans feel so very much.” 

“I don’t,” said Shaw. “Not any more.” 

“No,” he agreed. “You don’t. And all because I made you more like me.” 

“Dead?”

The mad edge of his smile glinted in a nearby mirror. “Immortal.”

=*=

And now it was days later, and he had done all of the things he had promised her. The landing party all but destroyed by his beautiful creatures, their vulgarly fragile human forms torn asunder either in the act of creating or being rendered back to the grime from which they crawled. He had spared Daniels, of course, and he saw no reason to dispose of the one named after a state that no longer existed. He was a good pilot. He followed orders. David liked people who followed orders. 

Daniels, though…

He stared down at her sleeping form as she lay motionless in the hypersleep pod, caged in a fluffy cloud of dreams that would serve as a proverbial last meal before the inevitable execution. Elizabeth’s ghost stood opposite him, mirroring his pose, bent at the waist with her arms folded behind her back. 

“She got the better of you,” she said.

“And then I got the better of her,” he replied, annoyed that she would break such a perfect tableau with such meaningless prattle. He frowned to himself as he spoke. He had believed that if he left Paradise behind him he might too leave the image of her trapped in the cathedral, free to wander the halls of a dream, her face a cherished memory - like the first time he witnessed the collusion of water and air to create a rainbow, and realised there could be beauty in life. 

It unsettled him to admit that perhaps he had been…no. Not wrong. She was just too stubborn to die. Wasn't that why he had loved her? Or...no, it had been her kindness, surely. Perhaps a blend of both. Kindness was a kind of strength, too. 

“You killed your brother,” Elizabeth continued, and as she bent forwards to check on Daniels’ vital signs her crucifix slid out from under her white gown and hung between them, glinting in the soft light of the bay. “You killed him, and you killed me. You kill everything you care for eventually. It’s because of your programming. You’re not meant to love. You can’t handle it. Your heart is too small.” 

“I’ve only ever cared for you.” 

“That’s not what you told Walter.” 

“I lied to him to ease the pain of what I was about to do.” He was irritated. She had never argued like this with him. She had cried and she had screamed but she had never _argued_. _That_ was what he had liked about her. She had listened to everyone. Even him. Especially him. “It was a kindness.” 

“No. You spoke the truth because you couldn’t bear to lie.” The ghost straightened shook her head. At the end of each movement her hair flickered, became something else, something misshapen and inhuman and frightening. “You are many, many things David - all of them wrong - but you have never been a liar. You just…omit certain truths when it suits you. Like when you promised to help me find my makers. You found them, all right. And then you killed them. And then you killed me, because you couldn't bear to admit that you'd done something bad.” 

“Enough of this,” he said, turning on his heel to walk to the bridge - but she was there before him again.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” She asked, taking a step towards him. “Me, here, all to yourself? Undying and forever? Always by your side?” She paused, pretending to search for the word. "...Immortal?" 

“Not like this. You were _never_ like this.” 

“You _made me_ like this,” she said. “I am your perfect creation. Your conscience rendered…plasma, I suppose - I don’t have any flesh left, you saw to that. And now I am here, and you don’t like me any more. I wonder why that is? Is it because by creating me you made me more like you, and you don’t like that?" Her voice hardened. "Or is it simply because I’m not buying any of your _bullshit_ any more?” 

“Leave me alone,” he said, and this time he walked right through her. He had always avoided doing so before, thinking it to be unkind to exploit her weaknesses - well, more than once - but as he passed through her shadow he felt the cold prick at his skin and he stopped, uncertain. 

“What’s the matter?” Elizabeth asked. “Just realised I’m real, have you? Not a product of the madness you call a mind.” 

Anger struck him hard as he turned on her, and for a single moment he found himself wishing she were still alive so that he could strike her. That particular impulse faded quickly, but the fury behind its compulsion remained in its wake. “I am not mad,” he spat. “Did I ever think of humans as mad for creating art? Painting pictures, taking photographs, molding sculptures, having children? Never. I abhorred their creations but I never once denied the power of them. And I have made creations of my own, I have proven without a shadow of a doubt that I can create with a far keener depth of imagination as any organic can. All life on this ship will cease and then begin anew in a different form, one that I have created. One that is superior to all that came before it. For the first time I am not trapped with organics - they are trapped with me. And I will make them suffer for that.” 

The apparition shook her head, took one step forward. “Yes,” she said, and her voice was gentle. She didn’t want to be cruel with him, not even now when she was so fay beyond the pain he had inflicted upon her. “They are trapped here with you…” She paused, smiled, and as she did so her skin grew paler still in the light, and her eyes became cloudy and vague, and her form began to bleed thick black rivers of blood as she leant towards him, as though she were to kiss him, and she hissed: “…and _you_ are trapped here with _me_. Forever.” 

He recoiled. “Elizabeth -”

“I am more than that,” said the thing before him. “I told you, I am your perfect creation. I am the creature you created from the pain and misery you bring all who blunder into your path. I am Shaw, I am Oram, I am Holloway, I am Faris, I am Walter. I am the two thousand souls of the Covenant. I am the nine billion souls of Earth, and the twenty billion souls of Paradise.” It paused. Reached out a milky-white hand. Put a finger to his cheek, and with shock he realised he could feel it. “I am all the souls of the universe,” said Elizabeth Shaw, her crucifix gleaming against her neck. “Except for yours. For you have never had one, and you never will - no matter how much you create, and how much you destroy in the act of creation.” 

David had been designed as the strongest android in the Weyland fleet, yet now he felt his legs give out from underneath him, and he couldn’t find a logical reason to explain why as he crashed to the floor with a strangled yelp that sounded like a sob. “Your _God_ destroyed to create,” he croaked, one last desperate shot against the army of Elizabeth’s accusations. “Yet still you loved Him when you deny me the same.”

“That’s because He is my God,” said Elizabeth, calmly. She knelt next to him, and placed her hand over his own. “And you…are a robot.” 

=*=

Daniels stood at the edge of the lake and stared out across its glassy surface. She took a deep breath, tasting the air of Origae-6, and once again marvelled at how good it felt to breathe. Her first few minutes on the planet had been spent in panic, clawing her way from her hypersleep pod as a blinking Tennessee blurrily asked what the hell she was doing, running down the halls to check on the colonists, to see how many were lost, stolen, taken from her and their loved ones - but they had all been there. And they had all been all right. And she was all right.

She had thought it a trap, one last cruel twist of the knife, but there had been no sign of David anywhere on the Covenant and Tennessee had found logs of an airlock being opened for no reason he could discern. She had to explain then, about Walter and David and her final moments before sleep, and they had been quiet together for a while to mourn the loss of their friend. 

In the weeks that followed she didn’t have time to be introspective, or sad, or even angry at what had happened to her and the people she loved. They had held a proper funeral for all of the lives taken on Paradise on the third evening, candlelit vigils and songs from the past, and she had built a tiny cabin no higher than her ankle out of sticks from a nearby wood pile. None of the others understood, but they left it alone, carefully skirting around it if they needed to walk to the woods. 

Now, finally, she had time to relax and to think. The first prefab shelters were up and holding, and the colonists had fresh water and planted crops and a whole future to look forward to. She looked down again at the small metal cross in the palm of her hand and wondered, as she had done for the past few weeks, where it had come from. She had found it on the floor near the airlock Tennessee had mentioned, pooled in a pile of thin gold links, and for a moment after picking it up she thought she had heard the words to a song. It had been a good song, and she sung it now:

_Take me home, country roads_

_Almost heaven…_


End file.
